Marc Anthony
Girl's Best Friend: Tattoos are as much Oribe's trademark as the big hair he loves. He largely credits Jennifer Lopez with his comeback. Above, Ms. Lopez's husband, Marc Anthony, captured Oribe and Ms. Lopez in a moment of contemplation.

By RUTH LA FERLA
Published: June 16, 2005
Miami Beach
AS Oribe Canales tells it, the high point of his career as a celebrity hairdresser and his fall from grace very nearly were one and the same. The year was 1993, the scene backstage before a fashion show in New York by Manolo, a Cuban-born designer with an avid cult. Grand enough himself to go by his first name only, Oribe (pronounced OR-bay) was seized by a burst of cocaine-fired inspiration. He scooped up a fistful of his special pomade, a hair cream thickly embedded with pearls, and darted toward the models. Skip to next paragraphForum: Fashion and Style

"I just wanted to touch their faces like this," he recalled with the sweep of a palm across his cheek. "The makeup was going to be genius."
The regular makeup artist stalked away. "I was feeling crazy, but it was good crazy," Oribe said. "The models were running away from me. They were scattering in all directions." Like a mad Pygmalion, he lurched after them, smearing their faces with gobs of paste.
When the show was over, Polly Mellen, a famously effusive editor at Allure, rushed backstage demanding, "Who did the makeup?" Oribe stepped up. "The moment was fabulous," he recalled, then added flatly, "Afterward I checked into rehab."
It was one of many times during his Cyclone ride of a career that Oribe, a champion of high-volume hair with wrist-to-shoulder tattoos like a biker from "The Wild One," was compelled to reinvent himself. In his glory years, during the decadent, high-octane 1980's and early 90's, he traveled with an entourage, waving a curling wand over the likes of Naomi Campbell and Linda Evangelista, whom he helped transform into fashion's reigning divas.
"Oribe did for hairdressing what Arnold Schwarzenegger did for bodybuilding," said Brad Johns, the creative director of the Avon Salon & Spa in New York, and a former protégé. "He took it out of commonness, made it respectable, an art. In his hands it wasn't hair, it was sculpture."
In 1991 Elizabeth Arden gave Oribe his own salon on Fifth Avenue, a gilded $3 million shrine to glamour modeled after a Venetian palazzo. There he ruled, arguably the most influential stylist of his day. Then it all fell away.
Dogged by personal problems - a dodgy manager, substance abuse and a reluctance to adapt to changing styles - Oribe began a slide into quasi-obscurity. He continued to work, but the designers, photographers and high-powered editors who had doted on him dropped him. Disenchanted with New York, he walked away from the Arden salon with no explanation two years ago and decamped for Florida. His sudden early fame and his long eclipse seemed to mark him as another casualty of the volatile fashion world, in which careers can ignite and flare out in the space of a few seasons.
"Oribe's hair legacy," wrote Lindsy Van Gelder in Allure magazine in 2001, "is that he took an old (and at the time tacky) idea - big hair - and made it into an over-the-top fashion statement."
Inspired by the girls he knew growing up in Charlotte, N.C. - all dolled up like Ginger on "Gilligan's Island" - he made his name as part of a powerful triumvirate, with the makeup artist François Nars and the photographer Steven Meisel, that created influential advertising campaigns and editorial spreads for fashion magazines in the 80's and early 90's. Oribe's apotheosis came during a shoot for a Comme des Garçons ad campaign with Christy Turlington. "I did her hair really curly with leaves in it, and everyone flipped," he recalled. "It put me in a different category as a hairdresser."
His audacity earned him a reputation that soon eclipsed that of Garren, his mentor, and other reigning stylists of the day. A wizard with props, wigs and greasy pomades, Oribe earned $20,000 - then an astronomical sum - to style the hair on the runways of Chanel and Versace, painting the models' hair blue, braiding it with tennis balls and using extensions to transform chin-grazing bobs into Rapunzel-length manes. "I would always be reaching for those extensions," he mused. "I used to call out, 'Where are my puppies?' just like Cruella De Vil."

__________________

"It is not money that makes you well dressed: it is understanding."
ChristianDior

Susan Arnot Heaney, who was communications director for Elizabeth Arden at the time Oribe opened his Fifth Avenue salon, remembered the aura he projected. "You would have to go the whole length of the place past the chandeliers and the sweeping drapes, and there at the end of it all was this attractive biker-looking person in black leather and jewelry with studs."

Barbara P. Fernandez for The New York Times
Oribe at his new salon.

Bayley Ledes, a senior editor at Life & Style Weekly, a celebrity magazine, said: "In those days everything was larger than life, the fashion shows, the models, the designers. It was the era of bad-boy designers like Jean Paul Gaultier, Claude Montana and Thierry Mugler, and people threw caution to the winds."
Ms. Ledes, who was the beauty editor of American Elle at the time, recalled venturing backstage before a show in Paris and discovering Oribe soaring on a cocktail of high spirits and cocaine. "He was completely frenetic, running around, sweating like a dog. I thought at the time, 'Oh, my God, he's going to have a heart attack,' " she said.
In 1993, shortly after the manic episode at the Manolo show, he checked into the Hazelden drug rehabilitation clinic, he recalled last week, to be treated for cocaine and alcohol abuse. He stressed that his substance abuse never reached epic dimensions. "It was never tragic," he said. "I was functioning for years." He has been drug-free since then, he said.
Paradoxically, it was not drugs or drink that undermined him as much as the advent of a new look in fashion, that willfully slovenly anti-style known as grunge, which eventually gave way to a minimalism that reigned through much of the 90's.
"I was in a terrible period of my career," Oribe said. Marc Jacobs "would say, 'Just throw this barrette in the model's hair and let it hang,' " he recalled. A devotee of the glossy, fastidiously maintained Rita Hayworth manes of the late 1940's and 50's, Oribe was shocked. "A barrette is supposed to pull back the hair and show the face," he said. He was equally stunned when during a shoot for Calvin Klein someone noticed a pimple on the model. " 'It's genius, let's leave it,' someone said," Oribe remembered with a roll of his eyes.
He continued to pick up magazine and runway assignments, but the pace slackened. "I had this Fifth Avenue salon, and all of a sudden without warning Steven Meisel replaced me" with another hair stylist on his shoots, Oribe recalled ruefully. Mr. Johns, then Oribe's chief colorist at Arden, chimed in with his own reflections: "Grunge was a sad day for all of us," he said. "We made the best of it, but I prayed every night as I kneeled by my bed, 'God, let it be over.' "
There were also problems on the business side of his New York salon. Oribe said that Omar Ismail, a manager whom he entrusted with his finances, had drug problems of his own and let the business slide. Mr. Ismail died last year. "Omar was a good manager, but he had some drug challenges that did impact his functioning," Ms. Heaney recalled.
When Oribe left the business, Oribe at Elizabeth Arden, in 2003, he said he received no financial settlement. "Emotionally it was a horrible period for me," he said.
He moved part time to Miami and opened a series of salons - two in New York, two in Miami, all of them now closed - as he struggled to regain his footing.
Gradually he has made a comeback, a return he credits in no small part to the singer and actress Jennifer Lopez. He engineered her metamorphosis from "Jenny from the block" to the glamorous plutocrat she portrayed in a recent Louis Vuitton ad campaign. He gave her a controversial retro-socialite bouffant for the 2002 Oscars, but chose a simpler, straight shoulder-length look for the April premiere of "Monster-in-Law."
In turn Ms. Lopez has been Oribe's champion. "Jennifer is fearless and adventurous," he said, bestowing on the pop star his highest fashion compliment. "She is," he said, "a big-hair kind of girl."
Six months ago Oribe borrowed the money to open a $1 million salon in Miami Beach at the tourist-clotted intersection of Euclid Street and Lincoln Road. It is a futuristic, beam-me-up-Scotty kind of space. In recent months his client list has expanded to Celine Dion, Gwyneth Paltrow and Penélope Cruz. He is also receiving high-profile print assignments again, flying off for a shoot for Elle, collaborating on campaigns with Redken.
And there are also the loyal customers who have stuck with him over the years, women for whom Miami is just a suburb of New York. "Even in New York it was always the crazies who loved me," he said. One in particular, whom he declined to name, presents him on each visit an envelope stuffed with the cuttings from her previous haircut. "This is what fell the last time," she tells him, then weeps. "She starts crying with the first snip, every time, and she doesn't stop until I've finished," Oribe said, imitating a high-pitched wail. "It's always, 'Stop, oh stop, you cut it too short!' "
Poised over the reception desk in the new salon is a poster-size photo of Ms. Lopez with Oribe. In the picture his arms are visible, embellished with the scrollwork of tattoos that have long been his signature. Today his hair, which used to crest in a slick James Dean pompadour, is combed back in a modified brush that is streaked, just perceptibly, with gray.
"Years ago I used to be the cool one," he said. "I used to be crazy at the clubs, living day by day, always into doing something wild. But when you're older, all of that isn't so cute anymore."
The recollections of the old days can still rankle. Last month he was one of 30 or so style-world luminaries invited to Donatella Versace's 50th birthday party at Mr. Chow in Manhattan. "After leaving that party, I was so happy I moved to Miami," he said. "I no longer have to depend on these people. They will eliminate you."

nytimes.com

__________________

"It is not money that makes you well dressed: it is understanding."
ChristianDior